Often when I talk to youth coaches, especially about using SSGs and live play to practice the issue of putting in offense always comes up. A refrain I often hear is "we have to practice our inbounds plays 5 on 0 because we only have 8 guys". I'd respond that 3 on 5 is better than 5 on 0. But then I was thinking about it and came up with another option: Run all your inbounds plays with 4 active players and 1 player as a spacer and emergency "get open" guy.  This will allow coaches to practice their inbounds plays basically live! They can do the basic actions with 4 players involved a ..read more

It's been a while...almost two years in fact. Having a kid and being a head high school coach will do that to you. The older I get the more the Ferris Bueller quote on the right rings true. So I'm going to try to get back to blogging to "stop and look around" the basketball world, process more of the stuff I'm seeing, and in general reflect as a coach. Thanks to J.P. Nerbun for pushing me to do this again a few months ago as well. I wanted my first blog post back to be a solid one, and I think I've got just the thing. Below is a step by step process of how I'm making a "Quick Fill" practice p ..read more

Photo courtesy of learntocoachbasketball.com The picture to the right comes from a blog by Brian McCormick on shooting. The picture proves one thing - traditional free throw shooting does not work. Look at Dwight Howard - shooting 82% in practice and 49% in games. The practice to game percentages are all over the place and don't really correlate. The obvious question is why - why doesn't making free throws in practice help you make them in games? I don't think, personally, that we are teaching them correctly. As McCormick eluded to in his article - we shoot free throws in block pract ..read more

We are 3 practices into the season, after 2 days of tryouts. One of the things are are experimenting with this year is practicing our offense with a shot clock. We've been using a 24 second shot clock for a some of our small sided games, 5 on 5, and full court work. In our full court work the clock starts with the ball crosses half court. It's early on, but I'm really liking using the shot clock while working on offense. We want to play quickly and it forces us to do that. It forces players to stop wasting time on offense (over dribbling, dribbling to nowhere, holding it too long, etc). It r ..read more

I haven't written for a while, being a head high school coach eats up quite a bit of time! But I want to get back into writing, I enjoy it. Something we've been seeing a lot on Twitter lately is the ridicule of trainers because they are having their clients doing 19 dribble moves with 19 cones, and so on. The issue, in my opinion, is that there is a disconnect between what we think of when we think "fundamentals" and what fundamental play looks like. When we think "fundamentals" we think too much about dribbling, dribble moves, and And-1 Mix-Taping someone. I think we could all agree that f ..read more

The video to the right is the classic Dennis Green "They are who we thought they were" rant about the Chicago Bears. Although it's often used tongue in cheek, I think there is some truth to the concept for basketball coaches. Often coaches, including myself, try to make players into something they are not - and all they end up doing is wasting time and energy. I think the ability to see a player for who they are is a skill that the truly great coaches have in common. And it's a skill that I'm trying to refine now that I've had the realization. To illustrate the point let me tell you a few st ..read more

Photo courtesy of FIBA There were some great games in this year's FIBA U17 World Championship, and can't wait to watch more of them on YouTube over the next few days. Special congrats to Coach Don Showalter and Team USA on yet another title! Below is a set that Spain loved to run. It's dangerous for two reasons. First, it has so many actions - UCLA, Flex, baseline double, down screen, etc. I always think the best sets have multiple actions, and this one definitely does that. The other amazing thing about the set is the cadence/pace that it is run at. Almost makes your head spin. Th ..read more

This blog is in response to the response that I got about the tweet to the right. There were a lot of questions and I hope that this blog can answer them. Tonight we started teaching shooting in our workouts. We use some things from the "Pro Shot" shooting method. If you have not seen any Pro-Shot stuff, it's as good as it gets for shooting. Below are some of their resources. Their YouTube channel is first class. If you have the money I would strongly suggest having them in to do a shooting clinic. It will be well worth your time. Pro Shot's Youtube Channel Pro Shot's Website Now about this b ..read more

High school vs. AAU basketball has been a hot topic on Twitter lately. Recently an AAU coach in Iowa sent out a letter to his players. He suggested that his players not play with their high school team in the summer. Since everyone else is weighing in on this topic, I decided to take the advice of   The Common Man - "Why not me, why not now?". I've coached both high school and AAU and think I can bring a pragmatic perspective to this - not that a single person cares about my perspective. So with that said, here are some random thoughts about high school and AAU. First of all, I stil ..read more

Image Courtesy of poetsandquants.com When should you correct mistakes? This is a question that every coach has to deal with daily in practices and games - what do you let go and what do you deal with? Saying that you correct every, single mistake sounds good in theory, but I believe that leads to jumbled messages for players and wasted time. The last few days I've heard this gem as rule of thumb: correct patterns of mistakes. If a mistake happens once treat it as an anomaly, when you see it a second/third time address it and the continue to address it. This cuts down on wasting time t ..read more